-h will always be different from the actual disk usage, you might also want
to play around with -B option too. Honestly though, NFS has never been
particularly good with stuff like this.

What happens when you use --apparent-size option.
 --apparent-size
              print apparent sizes,  rather  than  disk  usage;  although
 the
              apparent  size is usually smaller, it may be larger due to
holes
              in ('sparse') files, internal  fragmentation,  indirect
 blocks,
              and the like



On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote:

> I thought this issue was caused by a bug in the GNU du code, and I'm still
> not sure that it isn't, but it might be caused by bugs in file systems or
> NFS.  I'm using this version of du:
>
> $ du --version
> du (GNU coreutils) 8.4
> Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>
> I'm using one of the MSI supercomputers.  The /project/guanwh directory is
> NFS mounted.  Here's the kind of thing I'm seeing:
>
> $ du -sh /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
> 41G     /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
>
> $ du -sm /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
> 41171   /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
>
> $ du -sb /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
> 65435522887     /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
>
> $ du -sm /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
> 41299   /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
>
> $ du -sh /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
> 41G     /project/guanwh/miller/CHoP/intensity/
>
> Those commands were run seconds apart while a file transfer was increasing
> the amount of disk used.
>
> What you are seeing is that the result with -b (bytes) is correct, or at
> least nearly so, while the results with -m and -h are off by many
> gigabytes.  I am in the process of transferring files into that directory,
> but I don't see why options -m, -h and -b should give wildly different
> numbers!
>
> I'm wondering if the problem I'm having has to do with NFS mounting. There
> is a known issue:
>
> https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/du-invocation.html
>
> "On BSD systems, du reports sizes that are half the correct values for
> files that are NFS-mounted from HP-UX systems. On HP-UX systems, it reports
> sizes that are twice the correct values for files that are NFS-mounted from
> BSD systems. This is due to a flaw in HP-UX; it also affects the HP-UX du
> program."
>
> I am seeing usage with -sb that is 50% larger than that with -sB KB (or
> -sB MB or -sB GB).
>
> For me, the message is to use -sb instead of -sh.  The latter gives a nice
> compact result, but it is probably reading numbers of file blocks and those
> can have different meanings and cause different results.
>
> Mike
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>



-- 
Ben Lutgens
Linux / Unix System Administrator

Three of your friends throw up after eating chicken salad.  Do you think:
"I should find more robust friends" or "we should check that refrigerator"?
       -- Donald Becker, on vortex-bug, suspecting a network-wide problem
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